by Marty Klein
When this couple comes into therapy they often want me to adjudicate whether or not he watches “too much” porn or is even a porn addict. They’re typically surprised and disappointed when I won’t do that. I’ve learned that doing so is pointless, because no matter what I say, one of them will almost certainly reject my verdict.
“Let’s put that question aside for a moment,” I often respond instead, “and pursue some other questions that might be more helpful.” I could ask, “What do you mean by porn addiction?” I could also ask, “Well, if you’re not addicted, why do you keep doing something you know upsets her?” But those questions aren’t helpful, either. In fact, they can obscure the real issue.
Instead, I’d rather ask her, “Other than watching porn, what is he doing or not doing sexually, or in your relationship, that you dislike?”
In response to that question, women often say things like
He won’t look at me during sex
He calls me the wrong name during sex
He wants me to dress too sexy in bed, around the house, or out in public
He teases me or criticizes my body in mean ways
He won’t initiate sex
He won’t have sex with me at all
He’s constantly asking for sex
He loses his erection or comes too quickly with me
He can’t ejaculate when we have sex (or can’t ejaculate inside me)
He asks for totally outlandish things (e.g., anal, threesomes, watch me with another girl) that he should know I won’t do
He looks at women on the street in creepy ways
He looks at our teen daughter’s friends in creepy ways
Many people would feel bad about having to deal with any of these things. In fact, I deal with these and similar complaints in couples therapy all the time. When I begin treatment, I never assume I know what the cause is, whether it’s porn, a broken heart, major depression, someone having been molested, an endocrine problem, a deep lack of empathy, or something else.
“So let’s pursue these problems as far as we can without assuming we know what the cause is, and see where we end up,” I say. “If it turns out that porn is driving behaviors you don’t like, we can definitely address that.” Sometimes it is, often it isn’t.
This approach deemphasizes the porn aspect of a situation and emphasizes the actual lived experience of the people involved—particularly their pain. Rather than starting with a solution (no more porn) based on a hypothesis (porn causes your behavior which gives me pain) that may not be accurate, I’d rather start in the other direction: Your behavior gives me pain, and I’d like to figure out what we can do about this. Maybe I’ll find out what drives your behavior, and maybe I won’t; if you can change it in a genuine way without me fully understanding how you did so, I can live with that.
The trick here is to get the couple actually cooperating in her articulating her pain (as well as his, of course)—not to hurt him or to prove a point, but to share information with a partner. And the trick here is to get him to listen—not because he’s misbehaved and has to take his medicine, not because her diagnosis of him is right and he has to be bludgeoned into accepting it, but because his partner is sharing information that he needs and should want.
It may take weeks or months of therapy to maneuver the two of them into that collaborative space together. When they are, the question of whether he’s a porn addict often goes away, as does a lot of his defensiveness; what’s left is, “Omigosh, we have an issue here, you’re upset, what are we gonna do? Please tell me more.” “OK, I’ll tell you more.” My job is to keep the sharing cooperative and productive, rather than hostile, blaming, judging, defensive, repetitive, or superficial.
Does he want her to feel belittled, pushed away, unattractive? Generally not. Now the next trick: Don’t let them look for a solution too quickly, which often ends up with him saying, “I’m certainly not giving up x.” Instead, I want him curious and caring. I want him expressing sympathy—preferably on his own, or with help from me if he needs it. I also want her perceiving that he cares about her, completely independent of whatever his porn consumption is.
There’s something quite lovely about this process—a hurt person behaves like a partner, a defensive person behaves like a partner, and their curiosity has a healing effect. Once that healing balm starts soothing them both, spontaneous apologies often come. Eventually we can have the next conversation—Honey, I hate to see you so upset, what can we do about this (whatever “this” is)? Or: Honey, I can see a little private time works for you, how can we make that happen?
* * *
As couples therapy unfolds and people can create a collaborative mood on their own, we’re ready to address specific complaints: you keep asking for anal sex even though I keep saying I’ll never do that; you don’t seem to like my body anymore; and so on. These are hard subjects for people to discuss, but it’s necessary. If you have that kind of complaint, addressing it honestly gives you a better chance of success rather than trying to get your partner to stop looking at porn. Similarly, if you’ve stopped having sex because it’s boring and you watch a lot of porn and your partner wants you to stop, talking about sex instead of talking about porn gives you a better chance to create change.
And that’s where the serious difficulty comes in: talking about sex honestly. I’m very sympathetic about this, because it can be so painful. But without honest talk about sex, it’s rare that the sexual relationship will change. You can talk about porn for a thousand years—but that’s not the same as talking about “I don’t enjoy sex with you,” or “I’m still really hurt about what you said about my body five years ago,” or “You don’t seem to be thinking about me when we make love,” or “I don’t like the way you kiss” or “Your inhibitions about your body make it very difficult for me to enjoy sex with you.”
If you imagine what it would probably be like to say one of these things to your partner—especially if you love him or her—you can see why people would rather fight about porn than talk honestly about sex. Unfortunately, today’s PornPanic gives people the perfect excuse for not talking about sex—by encouraging women to make demands about porn, and encouraging porn consumers to feel guilty, broken, or defiant.
IS PORNOGRAPHY USE A FORM OF INFIDELITY?
This is another common question that I generally don’t answer. “Infidelity” is a contract violation. Most couples have extremely short “contracts”—they agree to share money, live together, be nice to each other, and, usually, to be monogamous. People rarely define monogamy while they’re coupling up, and when they do they almost never mention pornography.
People can disagree until the end of time about whether looking at pornography is a form of infidelity. When she says, “I don’t want you looking at porn because it’s a form of infidelity,” he usually says, “No it isn’t,” and then they disagree about that. Her pain doesn’t get addressed, because it doesn’t get spoken. He doesn’t get a chance to be sympathetic, nor does he get a chance to be heard about his interest in masturbation or sexual fantasy.
So when someone says, “You shouldn’t look at porn because it’s a form of infidelity,” I ask what else is the problem with his porn-watching. Sooner or later she will say one of two things:
It’s wrong, disgusting, or dangerous, and therefore he shouldn’t do it, or
It’s involved with other things that I don’t like, such as masturbation, violence, casual sex, oral sex, or women with perfect bodies.
Either way, we can then discuss the couple’s problem without having to decide about “infidelity.” If it really is (A), it raises an interesting question: What do you two do when you disagree on what’s immoral or wrong? If it’s (B), we go back to the process I described previously, in which we focus on the lived experience of feeling hurt, rejected, left out, or unimportant (or sympathetic, dismayed, or embarrassed), without assuming we know the root cause and therefore the solution.
Anyone can deci
de that virtually anything is a form of infidelity; after all, the definition of infidelity is completely subjective. Does it include flirting with strangers at the airport? Kissing a co-worker at a party? Getting a lap dance while on a business trip to Boston? You won’t have any trouble finding someone with either opinion about each of these.
Some people say that looking at porn constitutes infidelity because it means someone is experiencing their eroticism outside of the couple. That’s a definition that challenges adult autonomy in a serious way. It also raises the question: Is masturbation a form of infidelity? Because masturbating—with or without porn, with or without fantasy—is indeed experiencing one’s eroticism outside of the couple. If that’s unacceptable, then porn is the least of it—it’s masturbating that’s the problem.
For anyone who says, “Well, fantasy is in the imagination, but porn involves real people,” I’d say two things:
The porn consumer’s relationship is not with a person, it’s with a character played by an actress; and
People can have that same fantasy relationship with Jennifer Lopez, a college-age neighbor, or Florence Nightingale, whether or not one looks at a media image of them.
The consumption of porn doesn’t involve relating to the person of the actress—her worries about health insurance, her delight that her kid got accepted to Vanderbilt, her hope of getting a part on Broadway—any more than our consumption of an NFL game involves relating to the person of Tom Brady—his marital concerns, his kids’ health, or his feelings about getting older. We care about the character Brady plays—an NFL quarterback—and to the extent that he does that poorly, we abandon him immediately.
By the way, loving gossip about a celebrity does not constitute caring about them. Pick a political figure you hate—say, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Your interest in gossip about that person is an interest in the commodity (including popular conflict about) called Hillary or The Donald. Wanting to feel connected to the current story about these consumer products doesn’t mean we care about the people—or, for that matter, our country’s future.
IF SOMEONE CLAIMS THE BIBLE SAYS USING PORN IS INFIDELITY
There are several key passages from the New Testament and Proverbs that appear to condemn pornography1—if that’s how someone wants to interpret them. Of course, if someone wants Biblical justification for opposing virtually any sexual expression, it’s easy to find. You could even read the erotic Song of Songs as a satire “(Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth …”—oh puh-leeze!), or decide that the passage praising Lot’s daughters for seducing him was written by Satan.
The Bible was written in a time of radical gender separation and powerful traditions of proper gender-based behavior. Children were a valued economic resource, and so many women died (or become infertile) during childbirth that multiple wives were common. In most ancient societies women had few rights, and most Middle Eastern cultures were obsessed with menstrual impurity (many still are).
So the meaning of infidelity, flirting, perversion, and masturbation were very, very different then than they are now. And of course there are some barbaric practices in the Bible, including capital punishment for adultery. So everyone who wants the Bible in their lives has to make peace with it in their own way. But nobody—nobody—believes every single thing in the Bible literally, whether it’s an elderly woman giving birth, or the suggestion of selling one’s daughter into slavery, or the way that menstruating women make furniture unclean. If, during conflict with one’s mate, people of faith would admit that they want what they want, rather than using Scripture to justify what they want, those couples would have more productive conflict.
POWER STRUGGLES
Perhaps because they’re a familiar part of our lives from childhood on, many people underestimate the damage that power struggles bring to a relationship. When one person says, “If you love me, you’ll do x,” it doesn’t matter what x is—making a person prove they love you, and dictating the terms thereof, is just bad for relationships. It engenders bad feelings in the person who acquiesces, or in the person who doesn’t get what they want. It becomes part of the couple’s history, and it will be used again.
When people in a couple tell each other what they have to do or are forbidden to do, the subject is no longer the thing being discussed—it’s power. When one person says I know you better than you know yourself, the subject is power. When one person says, “Here’s the condition under which I’ll stay”—or be loving, or have sex—the subject is power. When one person says, “I get to make the definitions around here” of terms like infidelity, addiction, masculinity, sex, and intimacy, the subject is power.
And when one person says, “I have a feeling about you, and although it’s contradicted by what you say or by actual evidence, I’m going to continue to believe my feeling”—the subject is power.
People don’t like hearing this. People accuse me of taking sides. And I do take sides, although not in the way they think. I’m on the side of collaborative decision-making, rather than one person dictating terms to the other. I’m on the side of adults having dignity and autonomy. I’m on the side of adults treating each other respectfully.
Perhaps it’s easier to see this when the subject is something other than pornography. For example, imagine a husband telling his wife, “I’ve had it with your knitting—you’re out every Tuesday at the knitting club! You get two, three knitting magazines in the mail every month! Your closets are filled with wool of every imaginable color! There’s even knitting needles in the kitchen! I absolutely forbid you from knitting anymore!”
The wife may be a little over the top about knitting, and the husband’s anger is understandable—but would you think this is a reasonable response? What about someone who tells their boyfriend or girlfriend, “I forbid you from watching TV shows featuring racial stereotypes. They’re bad for society, and there’s no place for them in our home.” Or, “You may not eat veal, whether you’re with me or not. They treat those little calves horribly in order to produce tender veal, and I will not have either one of us supporting such a cruel industry.”
Whether we sympathize with one mate or the other in these vignettes, it should be clear that one person making unilateral demands or decisions undermines the relationship—often creating more problems than it solves. That kind of power grab is no more helpful—or intimate, or respectful—when the topic is pornography.
When couples quarrel, they frequently invoke common ideas from popular culture, including references to what’s normal. Asserting that you know what’s normal and that you judge that your partner isn’t—the subject of that conversation is power.
For example, sometimes we live in a time or place when slow dancing with someone else’s husband is considered scandalous; in other cultural circumstances it’s acceptable. This is completely different from the question of how you feel when you see or hear that your wife is slow dancing with another man. If you feel bad about it you deserve sympathy and a caring conversation with your wife. But if the conversation is about whether or not your feelings are normal, you’re unlikely to feel satisfied, and each of you is unlikely to feel understood.
We live in a time in which porn addiction is a popular idea. Popular culture also has plenty of ideas about normal amounts of sex in marriage, normal amounts of masturbation, normal sexual fantasies, and whether someone’s pain about being forbidden to masturbate is equivalent to their partner’s pain about them masturbating. When it comes to sex in general and porn in particular, too many psychologists simply adopt our culture’s ideas of what’s normal, and proclaim that to be truth or human nature. Both Dr. Phil and Oprah Winfrey got rich, powerful, and famous telling people—mostly women—what’s normal, and encouraging them to demand that their loved ones behave in so-called normal ways.
The real answer to a power struggle is to acknowledge it and to agree to address substantive issues rather than attempt to win, be right, or get the other person to submit. Yes, this requir
es self-discipline, communication, patience, tolerance, and a real desire to create a working partnership. Struggling for power is much easier. Of course, people who struggle for power in relationships are generally not happy with the result—whether they win or lose.
So you can say you don’t like porn without having to demonize porn-watching as abnormal. On the other hand, calling porn-watching abnormal or saying your boyfriend’s favorite porn is perverse isn’t a good enough reason for him to stop watching it. After all, he may not agree that his activities are abnormal or perverse. The two of you could disagree about that until the end of time.
You’re much better off talking about feeling left out or insecure about your body (or whatever is troubling you about his porn-watching) than you are talking about what’s wrong with his porn-watching. The first will draw him to you, while the second will create an adversarial situation.
This is the perfect place to say clearly that not every problem involving porn is a porn problem—just like not every problem involving a car is a car problem. For example, if your husband borrows your car and it gets dented while he’s parked downtown, then he tries to hide it from you or deny that it happened while he had the car, that’s not a car problem, right? That’s a problem of selfishness, dishonesty, fear, or something else.
And so similarly, it’s not a “porn problem” if:
He leaves porn accessible to the kids
He leaves evidence of his masturbation around the house
He talks about porn way more than you want to hear
He makes lots of jokes about porn or sex that you don’t find funny
He spends more money on porn than your household budget can support
He says he doesn’t care that you’re unhappy about his porn use
He periodically demands that you watch porn with him after you’ve said you don’t want to